TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2012: US prosecutors say one of the world’s largest file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, was shut down, and its founder and several company executives were charged with violating piracy laws, accused of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content.

OTHER EVENTS

1649: Trial of England’s King Charles I for treason begins.

1795: French forces overrun Holland.

1825: Ezra Daggett and Thomas Kinsett patent the tin canning process for food, pioneering the age of convenience for housewives and armies alike.

1918: The Bolsheviks dissolve Russian Constitutional Assembly in Petrograd.

1937: Millionaire Howard Hughes sets a transcontinental air record by flying his monoplane from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey, in seven hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds.

1944: The US Government relinquishes control of the nation’s railroads after settling a wage dispute.

1945: Soviet troops take Krakow, Poland, in World War II.

1966: India’s new prime minister, Indira Gandhi, pledges to follow path of nonalignment in world affairs.

1981: The United States and Iran sign an agreement paving the way for the release of 52 Americans held hostage for more than 14 months.

1994: An AC-130 transport plane is hit by small-arms fire near Sarajevo, prompting UN officials to suspend the city’s vital airlift.

2000: Michael Skakel, nephew of the late Senator Robert Kennedy surrenders to face charges that he beat a childhood friend to death 24 years before.

2001: Prosecutors say Los Angeles-area airports may have been potential targets of Ahmed Ressam, arrested for bringing bomb-making material into the United States from Canada.

2003: Indian officials say an intense cold spell in parts of India, Bangladesh and Nepal has claimed 1,300 lives across the region since December 2002. Millions of people living outdoors and in uninsulated homes are threatened with exposure.

2004: A Japanese team that returns from a mission to investigate the United States’ first confirmed case of mad cow disease warns that American and Canadian cows were still vulnerable to an outbreak of the illness.

2005: The presidents of Colombia and Brazil meet on their Amazon jungle border to discuss the dispute between Colombia and another neighbour, Venezuela, sparked by the abduction of a Marxist guerrilla on Venezuelan soil.

2007: The United Nations’ first all-female peacekeeping contingent — made up of 105 Indian policewomen who have been training since September — is set to deploy to Liberia.

2008: The bodies of nearly 50 Africans trying to immigrate wash up on Yemen’s shores after their boat capsizes in the treacherous waters of the Gulf of Aden. The 35 survivors tell authorities that at least 135 people, all Somalis and Ethiopians, were crammed into the boat.

2009: Russia and Ukraine sign a deal that restores natural gas shipments to Ukraine and paves the way for an end to the nearly two-week cutoff of most Russian gas to a freezing Europe.

2011: Palestinian diplomats find international support for their complaint that Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory are illegal, but the US strongly opposes bringing the matter up in the UN Security Council.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

James Watt, Scottish engineer-inventor (1736-1819); Auguste Comte, French philosopher (1798-1857); Edgar Allen Poe, US writer (1809-1849); Paul Cezanne, French artist (1839-1906); Robert MacNeil, Canadian-born newsman-writer (1931- ); Shelley Fabares, US actress (1944- ); Dolly Parton, US singer/actress (1946- )

—AP